Secrets of a Cruise Ship Designer

Ask any cruise ship designer, and they'll tell you the same thing: that they're constantly torn between the compulsion to make passengers forget they’re on a moving sea-bound vessel, while reminding them that they’re in, on, and by the sea. Step-out balconies, wide-open pools, and observation decks pervade our designs, while we obsess about addressing movement, noise, and pretty much anything that would make a passenger realize they’re in a confined space that’s in constant motion. After five years of working as a designer on the interiors of various ships, including both Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seas and Allure of the Seas, I’ve come to realize that cruise ship design is actually quite different than designing on terra firma. Below, I’ve enlisted some of my colleagues to help illustrate the most interesting design quirks.

Things Aren't Always As They Seem

Have you ever had that nightmare where a sharp icicle falls and hits you on the head? Well, imagine that icicle was actually a crystal from a chandelier—considerably heavier and sharper than an icicle. “I’ve heard horror stories of guests getting injured from falling crystal shards dropping from poorly designed chandeliers,” says Bentley Brownfield, Senior Project Manager for Newbuild Interiors at Holland America Group. But don't panic: every crystal that seems to blithely dangle from these fixtures is, in fact, reinforced by a rigid steel rod and engineered to a tee. “Each crystal is attached by hand to a metal mesh frame and cleverly lit so that you only see the sparkle of the crystal,” says John Hadley, Director of Marine Lighting for Chelsom, the mastermind behind one 6,000-crystal chandelier. Here’s another design illusion: while many luxury ships appear to have cleaned out an entire quarry of fancy Italian marble, it's a very thin layer of marble mounted onto honeycomb aluminum structure to minimize weight. And finally, those mysterious doorways you always see lining the corridors? They won't lead you down to some kind of a raucous dancehall in the bowels of the ship (à la Rose’s rebellious night out with Jack in Titanic). Rather, they merely hide electrical closets and air conditioning units.

Cruise Ships Are One Continuous Earthquake

What you may not (and trust me, marine engineers do everything in their power so that you won’t) notice while on board is that when a cruise ship is at sea, it vibrates just as much as a building would during an earthquake. “There is constant motion and forces sending vibrations throughout the structure of a ship. Not only does it need to be strong, it also has to have enough stiffness to allow guests to feel secure,” explains A. Scott Butler, co-founder of Boston-based Wilson Butler Architects, who has been designing cruise ships for over 20 years. Needless to say, interior designer Adam Tihany raised a few eyebrows when, on his first cruise ship project, Celebrity Solstice, he proposed the first wine tower at sea—complete with 2,028 bottles. "I remember the first time I presented it, everyone in the room gasped," Tihany recalls. "They said, ‘if the ship moves, the wine moves,’ so we designed a gyroscopic system that suspends each wine bottle separately, protecting and stabilizing the bottles while the ship sails,” he adds. We can all drink to that, right?

Cruise ship chandeliers, like this one on the Seven Seas Explorer, don't move—and for good reason.

Courtesy Regent Seven Seas Cruises

Heavy-Duty Construction or Nintendo Game?

It may surprise you that, unlike your standard-issue skyscraper or mega-resort, a cruise ship isn’t built from the ground (or sea) up. In fact, pieces of the ship are built off-site and and then hoisted in Tetris-style by a giant gantry crane. That means that each stateroom, right down to the addition of the pillows, is pre-fabricated off-site, and so are many of the ship’s other venues. In fact, these prefab pieces can be as big as four decks in height and span one-half of the ship’s width. Why, you may ask? Cruise architecture veteran A. Scott Butler explains that, "if the staterooms didn’t get built until the stateroom deck structure were in place, it could add as much as a year to the project timeline. What’s more, space can be very limited, both in the shipyard and onboard. If every detail had to be put together in one place, there would be thousands of workers all on top of one another." Sometimes, though, this fool-proof plan can pose some challenges. When, on Holland America’s MS Koningsdam, art consultant Tal Danai tried to procure and install Tihany's 7.5-ton steel giant harp sculpture in the ship’s atrium, "the side of the ship had to be cut open to bring the [four pieces of the sculpture] in. The parts were hoisted into the ship's atrium and assembled in the air."

Designing a Miniature City at Sea

In a typical resort, the pool is at ground level, while restaurants are, at most, on the second or third floor, and theaters are housed in their own buildings. On a cruise ship, though, pools are stacked on the highest decks for ultimate sun exposure, while theaters are located towards the front or back, since you can't pass through them. The latter, though, can be adjacent to, or even on top of, staterooms—which means that, while you’re blissfully sleeping in your cabin, some nocturnal party animals may be getting down right above your head. But why don’t you hear them? Dance floors are raised to accommodate an added layer of acoustical absorption; all speakers are hugged by a sound-absorbing material; carpeting is an absolute must; walls are padded in the prettiest sound-absorbing fabrics a designer can find; and nearly every inch of ceiling is clad in perforated acoustical tiles. Bad news if you like the smell of bacon in the morning: you'd never be able to tell that your stateroom shares a wall with the kitchen, either, thanks to powerful exhaust systems that quell any unpleasant food odors.

Great Heights

If there's one thing that constantly weighs on a cruise ship designer’s mind, it's this: that jaw-dropping high ceilings are basically an impossibility on a cruise ship, due to an elaborate network of plumbing, electrical, and firefighting equipment that needs to be totally concealed. So how do we impart the same “wow factor” as the lofty restaurants and bars we’re famous for designing on land, and make guests feel like they’re not on a cramped deck? Designers battle with shipbuilders and engineers to introduce coffers, mirrors, brightly-lit ceiling coves, and false skylights that offer an illusion of higher ceilings, especially in larger rooms. But for some designers, giving spaces in cruise ships the illusion of height starts at the walls. "I always make my wood paneling a little lower than normal, which brings the eye up and makes ceilings appear higher than they are," explains hotel designer Toni Tollman, who created the spacious, yacht-inspired design of Uniworld’s SS Joie de Vivre.

The Myths of the Ancient Mariner

The cruise world is still spooked by some ancient mariners’ myths and superstitions. Ask any sea captain where they keep “the bottle”—a glass container full of water that touched the hull of the ship on its first departure from the shipyard—and they'll all proudly point it out to you. And, we defy you to attend a ship-naming ceremony not presided over by a woman who is meant to be some kind of fairy godmother. Some of this seafaring superstition makes its way into design, as well. “I’ve heard that images of horses were bad luck since they would be carried over from the new world in the hulls of the wooden ships, get spooked, and punch holes in the bottom," says Holland–America’s Bentley Brownfield, citing his favorite design superstition. And, despite its continued association with all things water, there are some who claim that nautilus motifs are bad luck, since the nautilus typically sinks to the depths of the ocean. But all this hearsay aside, it won’t guarantee the safety of a ship. “The real reason that modern cruise ships are reliable and safe is the incredible engineering that goes into the architectural and systems design,” says Brownfield.